Next, we’ll need to define some custom attributes for our view. Let’s start off by defining its: action text, colour and size. To make things easier, we’ll need to be able to define these attributes in the view’s layout.xml file. As a result, we’ll need to define these attributes as styleables, by creating a new /res/values/attrs.xml file:

attrs.xml

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<resources>

<declare-styleable name="PasswordEditText">

<attr name="showActionText"format="string"/>

<attr name="hideActionText"format="string"/>

<attr name="actionLabelColor"format="color"/>

<attr name="actionLabelSize"format="dimension"/>

</declare-styleable>

</resources>

Next, we’ll need to associate these attributes with our custom view. So, let’s start off by giving them some default values:

Awesome, all we need now is the Show/Hide action text. The EditText (being an extension of TextView) has built-in Compound Drawables and we’ll use those to house our action text. Since the end goal is to insert an editable message (SHOW / HIDE) in our custom view, we’ll just need to find a way to convert a String into a drawable – this is where the magic happens. We’ll create TextView and style it with our custom attributes (text, colour, size). Once we’re happy with it, we just essentially take a screenshot of it, convert that into a drawable and assign it as a Compound Drawable:

Great, now we’ve got a custom drawable inside our view. We just need a way to handle touch events to determine what happens when users click it. To do this, our custom view will need to implement a View.OnTouchListener to handle this event. Then, all we have to do is get our drawable’s dimensions and decide what happens when a touch event is registered within those coordinates:

Wrapping things up

And that’s basically it. We’ve created a custom Password EditText, defined it’s attributes, added a custom editable drawable and defined what happens when users tap it. This is how the final PasswordEditText.java class looks like:

PasswordEditText .java

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import android.content.Context;

import android.content.res.TypedArray;

import android.graphics.Bitmap;

import android.graphics.Color;

import android.graphics.drawable.BitmapDrawable;

import android.graphics.drawable.Drawable;

import android.text.method.PasswordTransformationMethod;

import android.util.AttributeSet;

import android.util.TypedValue;

import android.view.MotionEvent;

import android.view.View;

import android.widget.EditText;

import android.widget.TextView;

/**

* Displays a Password EditText with a SHOW/HIDE button at the right-hand side.